Already said, DIVX tried it, DIVX flopped. There's already a means to not own a disc, and that's called Blockbuster. For those who have great amount of efforts returning discs on time(or getting out of their homes to rent a disc), there's NetFlix.
You know what, maybe you're right, though! Maybe it would be easier if I just "rent" things, and some corporation bills me for whatever they think I'm worth. Maybe my computer should do this, too! Perhaps my NIC should periodically contact the RIAA and MPAA to tell them what music I'm listening to, and what movies I'm watching, and then they can send me a bill every month. Send my ISP a record of all the websites I've visited, and based upon their relative importance, send me a bill for those, too... Throw software into there, and my computer turns into an infinite stream of revenue for a plethora of companies! Hooray! \
Tranquility is completely unique, I give it that. But, that's paired with fairly horrible controls, simplistic graphics, and amazingly repetitive gameplay. Bounce on platforms to get spinners, repeat.
Animal Crossing was new for the United States - I think a N64 version was released in Japan. But, regardless, it is an excellent game that stole a few months of my life. I wouldn't compare it to The Sims at all - in The Sims, you don't plant fruit trees for fun and profit. You don't go fishing to become immortalized in your local museum, or maybe to win the fishing tournament.
What Nintendo did present was the potential of "goal-less games," as well as the potential for games based off of a real-time clock. I admit, I felt kinda geeky when I got all excited over the first snow in the game...
Fallout was one of the finest RPGs I've ever played. Storyline was fantastic, gameplay was excellent... graphics weren't spectacular, but that wasn't the game's selling feature. Fallout 2 came along, rehashing the same old graphics, and same old gameplay, into an absolutely amazing game, superior to the original. The story is excellent, blending along with the first quite nicely, and with much more depth...
Fallout 3 would have been amazing. I have no doubt about this. The only thing which could be better would be Fallout Online.
Bungee was an Apple exclusive developer back-in-the-day, as we're all aware... Maybe they're still Apple fans and they're just running the dev tools through VirtualPC.
I found it more ironic that the video was released in QuickTime format. I was all set to not be able to watch it because it was a WMV - vlc and mplayer don't exactly support them well. But, alas, Bungee made me proud.
So, where are these movies? Maybe a still-image sequence...?
Although I'm impressed that this team managed to do this, I'd kinda like to see it. A text-description of this process leaves me feeling all shades of empty inside. Gimmie gimmie gimmie.
Stay legal and avoid breaking the law! MP3s and file-sharing networks are legal and using them is also legal. Inside our member's area you will find a section dedicated on showing how to stay 100% legal while getting access to the largest file sharing networks.
If I were an individual who knew nothing of the RIAA, I might see this as a legal way to download music and movies. Mainly because it says that it's legal. It's not like they're telling you crack is legal, they're telling you file sharing is legal - and we all know damn well that it is.
So if you're a poor sap that gives them money for access to their entrapment file sharing service, only to get email from a lawyer the next day saying you're caught red-handed... you probably aren't getting a refund. Those who didn't know any better have made a $23.88 donation to the RIAA's defense fund.
The newer models have better battery life, in my experience... I leave mine plugged in when not in use, and I've used it for 10ish hours without having to recharge... I've never had the battery die, to be honest with you. I had a 5-gig scroll wheel, which unfortunately died... It survived its first drop down a flight of stairs, but the next drop onto concrete did it in. That's a reason not to buy an iPod, isn't it...? It should have survived at least three catastrophic drops! Although the mp3 player I had before that didn't survive the first... hmm.
At least several months ago, I downloaded Maya PLE... the free version, for those who want to learn how to use this powerful tool. Basically, the only thing that has changed in the past several months - aside from the upgrade from 4.5 to 5.0 - is that there's a neato newspaper article about it!
Strangely enough, I downloaded v5.0 last night from the kind folks at Alias... no slashdot effect for me:D
EMusic was a wonderful service. Browse through their albums, get the link for the album you want to download, and go. But $9.95 a month for 40 TRACKS?! Fudge that, I'll go use one of the many P2P networks and steal my music. Alternatively, as FTP file serving is making a delightful comeback, my friends and I can set up a safe little haven of file swapping...
I've been an EMusic member for quite a while, and have preached about the beauty of this service here on/. many times. But, my account is getting cancelled today, after I leech a mighty pile of new music. Goodbye, oh savior of the music industry. Hello, bitch of the recording industry.
My point remains the same - one of the picasso-esque towers of the Stata Center is dubbed "The William H. Gates" building, and there's the "Gates Entry." Not like the name means anything, and it'll be stripped as soon as the building is opened to students. But somewhere in there, there'll be a plaque thanking good ole Billy for his delightful contribution to the institute.
I'm all for new buildings, and I couldn't care less who actually funds them. However, Microsoft has and will continue to influence the research being done at LCS, the material in courses, and certainly the operating systems commonly used on department-owned machines. The graphics lab has upgraded many old SGI machines to sparkly-new Windows machines... what, for their speed, stability, or security?
Guess who bought MIT a new comp sci building...?
on
Big Company on Campus
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The "William H. Gates" building at MIT, part of their new computer science complex, was paid for by a certain individual whose name appears on the building. Additionally, Microsoft funds a great amount of "research" around campus, giving undergrads the opportunity to work for Microsoft at $7.50/hour.
Don't feel like paying an employee? Pay a school and get students to do it instead!
Needless to say, I'm bitter about "Microsoft presents 'College Education.'"
My PowerMac is on a network with many, many thousands of other machines, and it's always played nice.
Which would you rather have on your network, a worm-infested Windows machine, or a "creepy, backwards" Apple? As far as large-scale networking goes, MacOS X seems much friendlier than a Windows machine at this point.
I regularly use Windows machines, linux/solaris/*nix machines, but I dropped the money for a Mac at home. It's plenty fast, very stable, excessively easy to use... yet still has the infinite power of a well-armed linux machine.
I think that this sample group is actually quite good. It doesn't exactly cover the whole spectrum of music - where's country and disco?! - but, it covers a few areas which I've noticed horrible problems with encoding in the past.
For example, the IDM choice(which stands for "intelligent dance music." btw) is an excellent stress test, as the genre tends to be oriented around completely synthetic, rapidly changing sounds. Hard to describe, but in my experience with this genre, there's a pretty impressive difference between encoding at 192kbs mp3 and 256kbps. The only other genre which requires such high bitrates, in my opinion, is classical.
Also, the "drums and ride cymbals" selection is another excellent stress-test. Drums can be considered impulses, another thing which doesn't exactly conform to encoding methods very well. And I'm sure you've heard the flanging of cymbals in mp3s...
Although they could have been more thorough in their genre choices, and their choices don't really encompass my tastes in music(where's hip-hop? turntablism? buddhist chant?!), I think that the sample group probably gives an accurate depiction of the relative quality of the encoding for music.
As a PC user, I was used to buying a machine and having a processor with double the clockspeed a year down the line... And now Apple has pulled the same trick:(
Oh well. I'm not going to complain... The specs on those machines were unbelievable - I'm just glad Apple is no longer lagging behind in the specs anymore, and the prices on those machines are reasonable to boot.
Yeah, I'd have to say that looks more like the Finder-driven Finder. The only thing which looks like Safari is the brushed metal appearance, and the back/foward buttons for navigating. This is more a sign of consistent buttons and actions through Apple applications - if you want buttons that do the same thing as other applications, why not make them look like the other applications?
This sounds like a fairly good idea to me, but isn't it basically just a portable HD with a battery that uses wireless connectivity...?
Porta-server sounds really impressive, but basically, it sounds like a FireWire drive that's slower, but has the advantage of not requiring a big, clunky wire to use it. Lack of a big, clunky wire will probably jack up the price to some unreasonable level, though... in which case, why buy a wireless HD when I can just use my iPod...? There's also that additional issue with privacy -- if you no longer need a connection to a drive to read it, how do you hide it from your foes?
And how does this lead to the downfall of the laptop/PDA? Having no display or input seems like a hinderance to accessing the information when you're on the go.
I just downloaded Hydra and fired it up... and I'm really, really, really impressed. The program itself is very fast and clean, with an intuitive interface. Yes, other programs are capable of multiple users editing a single file, but I don't know of any programs that allow for this with a single mouse click.
We'll see how useful this actually is in time, but it is a neat little program.
Well duh. Publications are so 1970's. All you need now is a little search engine... and boom! Any information you want is yours! And nobody will ever know who was looking for these things...
Except for all of the logs kept by google and friends... not like it's necessary to log everything, because you can report searches for key words like "nuclear arms how-to" and the likes. Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they can't see you...
It's a lot harder to pinpoint the location of someone who bought a magazine from a news stand than it is to have a machine log IPs of people searching for sketchy stuff. Unless there are little radio transmitters in magazines these days, which I wouldn't doubt.
Long ago, I came across Carrion Sound, which has been tweaking toys and instruments of today and yesterday into noise masterpieces. Mp3 examples are there, too. A bit more on the artistic-side, but many of his examples are quite impressive. And although many-a Speak-and-Spell were destroyed in this man's work, he destroyed many, many, many, many other things, too.
Anyone who can turn a Pikachu doll into something even more disturbing should get a medal.
Slashdot Mirror
Please tell me that was sarcasm...
Already said, DIVX tried it, DIVX flopped. There's already a means to not own a disc, and that's called Blockbuster. For those who have great amount of efforts returning discs on time(or getting out of their homes to rent a disc), there's NetFlix.
You know what, maybe you're right, though! Maybe it would be easier if I just "rent" things, and some corporation bills me for whatever they think I'm worth. Maybe my computer should do this, too! Perhaps my NIC should periodically contact the RIAA and MPAA to tell them what music I'm listening to, and what movies I'm watching, and then they can send me a bill every month. Send my ISP a record of all the websites I've visited, and based upon their relative importance, send me a bill for those, too... Throw software into there, and my computer turns into an infinite stream of revenue for a plethora of companies! Hooray! \
Right on! I forgot about that game... I registered it after playing one level of the demo. Certainly unique in many ways.
Mod parent up... if you've never played this game, look into it. I think they're working on - or have released - a Windows port.
Tranquility is completely unique, I give it that. But, that's paired with fairly horrible controls, simplistic graphics, and amazingly repetitive gameplay. Bounce on platforms to get spinners, repeat.
Animal Crossing was new for the United States - I think a N64 version was released in Japan. But, regardless, it is an excellent game that stole a few months of my life. I wouldn't compare it to The Sims at all - in The Sims, you don't plant fruit trees for fun and profit. You don't go fishing to become immortalized in your local museum, or maybe to win the fishing tournament.
What Nintendo did present was the potential of "goal-less games," as well as the potential for games based off of a real-time clock. I admit, I felt kinda geeky when I got all excited over the first snow in the game...
Fallout was one of the finest RPGs I've ever played. Storyline was fantastic, gameplay was excellent... graphics weren't spectacular, but that wasn't the game's selling feature. Fallout 2 came along, rehashing the same old graphics, and same old gameplay, into an absolutely amazing game, superior to the original. The story is excellent, blending along with the first quite nicely, and with much more depth...
Fallout 3 would have been amazing. I have no doubt about this. The only thing which could be better would be Fallout Online.
Bungee was an Apple exclusive developer back-in-the-day, as we're all aware... Maybe they're still Apple fans and they're just running the dev tools through VirtualPC.
I found it more ironic that the video was released in QuickTime format. I was all set to not be able to watch it because it was a WMV - vlc and mplayer don't exactly support them well. But, alas, Bungee made me proud.
So, where are these movies? Maybe a still-image sequence...?
Although I'm impressed that this team managed to do this, I'd kinda like to see it. A text-description of this process leaves me feeling all shades of empty inside. Gimmie gimmie gimmie.
HOW IS THAT POSSIBLY LEGAL?!
If I were an individual who knew nothing of the RIAA, I might see this as a legal way to download music and movies. Mainly because it says that it's legal. It's not like they're telling you crack is legal, they're telling you file sharing is legal - and we all know damn well that it is.
So if you're a poor sap that gives them money for access to their entrapment file sharing service, only to get email from a lawyer the next day saying you're caught red-handed... you probably aren't getting a refund. Those who didn't know any better have made a $23.88 donation to the RIAA's defense fund.
The newer models have better battery life, in my experience... I leave mine plugged in when not in use, and I've used it for 10ish hours without having to recharge... I've never had the battery die, to be honest with you. I had a 5-gig scroll wheel, which unfortunately died... It survived its first drop down a flight of stairs, but the next drop onto concrete did it in. That's a reason not to buy an iPod, isn't it...? It should have survived at least three catastrophic drops! Although the mp3 player I had before that didn't survive the first... hmm.
that is all.
At least several months ago, I downloaded Maya PLE... the free version, for those who want to learn how to use this powerful tool. Basically, the only thing that has changed in the past several months - aside from the upgrade from 4.5 to 5.0 - is that there's a neato newspaper article about it!
:D
Strangely enough, I downloaded v5.0 last night from the kind folks at Alias... no slashdot effect for me
EMusic was a wonderful service. Browse through their albums, get the link for the album you want to download, and go. But $9.95 a month for 40 TRACKS?! Fudge that, I'll go use one of the many P2P networks and steal my music. Alternatively, as FTP file serving is making a delightful comeback, my friends and I can set up a safe little haven of file swapping...
/. many times. But, my account is getting cancelled today, after I leech a mighty pile of new music. Goodbye, oh savior of the music industry. Hello, bitch of the recording industry.
I've been an EMusic member for quite a while, and have preached about the beauty of this service here on
My point remains the same - one of the picasso-esque towers of the Stata Center is dubbed "The William H. Gates" building, and there's the "Gates Entry." Not like the name means anything, and it'll be stripped as soon as the building is opened to students. But somewhere in there, there'll be a plaque thanking good ole Billy for his delightful contribution to the institute.
I'm all for new buildings, and I couldn't care less who actually funds them. However, Microsoft has and will continue to influence the research being done at LCS, the material in courses, and certainly the operating systems commonly used on department-owned machines. The graphics lab has upgraded many old SGI machines to sparkly-new Windows machines... what, for their speed, stability, or security?
The "William H. Gates" building at MIT, part of their new computer science complex, was paid for by a certain individual whose name appears on the building. Additionally, Microsoft funds a great amount of "research" around campus, giving undergrads the opportunity to work for Microsoft at $7.50/hour.
Don't feel like paying an employee? Pay a school and get students to do it instead!
Needless to say, I'm bitter about "Microsoft presents 'College Education.'"
My PowerMac is on a network with many, many thousands of other machines, and it's always played nice.
Which would you rather have on your network, a worm-infested Windows machine, or a "creepy, backwards" Apple? As far as large-scale networking goes, MacOS X seems much friendlier than a Windows machine at this point.
I regularly use Windows machines, linux/solaris/*nix machines, but I dropped the money for a Mac at home. It's plenty fast, very stable, excessively easy to use... yet still has the infinite power of a well-armed linux machine.
I think that this sample group is actually quite good. It doesn't exactly cover the whole spectrum of music - where's country and disco?! - but, it covers a few areas which I've noticed horrible problems with encoding in the past.
For example, the IDM choice(which stands for "intelligent dance music." btw) is an excellent stress test, as the genre tends to be oriented around completely synthetic, rapidly changing sounds. Hard to describe, but in my experience with this genre, there's a pretty impressive difference between encoding at 192kbs mp3 and 256kbps. The only other genre which requires such high bitrates, in my opinion, is classical.
Also, the "drums and ride cymbals" selection is another excellent stress-test. Drums can be considered impulses, another thing which doesn't exactly conform to encoding methods very well. And I'm sure you've heard the flanging of cymbals in mp3s...
Although they could have been more thorough in their genre choices, and their choices don't really encompass my tastes in music(where's hip-hop? turntablism? buddhist chant?!), I think that the sample group probably gives an accurate depiction of the relative quality of the encoding for music.
As a PC user, I was used to buying a machine and having a processor with double the clockspeed a year down the line... And now Apple has pulled the same trick :(
Oh well. I'm not going to complain... The specs on those machines were unbelievable - I'm just glad Apple is no longer lagging behind in the specs anymore, and the prices on those machines are reasonable to boot.
Gimmie.
Yeah, I'd have to say that looks more like the Finder-driven Finder. The only thing which looks like Safari is the brushed metal appearance, and the back/foward buttons for navigating. This is more a sign of consistent buttons and actions through Apple applications - if you want buttons that do the same thing as other applications, why not make them look like the other applications?
I'm sure it won't be running on my operating system, but I'll be glad to to distribute it to as many people as possible :)
This sounds like a fairly good idea to me, but isn't it basically just a portable HD with a battery that uses wireless connectivity...?
Porta-server sounds really impressive, but basically, it sounds like a FireWire drive that's slower, but has the advantage of not requiring a big, clunky wire to use it. Lack of a big, clunky wire will probably jack up the price to some unreasonable level, though... in which case, why buy a wireless HD when I can just use my iPod...? There's also that additional issue with privacy -- if you no longer need a connection to a drive to read it, how do you hide it from your foes?
And how does this lead to the downfall of the laptop/PDA? Having no display or input seems like a hinderance to accessing the information when you're on the go.
I just downloaded Hydra and fired it up... and I'm really, really, really impressed. The program itself is very fast and clean, with an intuitive interface. Yes, other programs are capable of multiple users editing a single file, but I don't know of any programs that allow for this with a single mouse click.
We'll see how useful this actually is in time, but it is a neat little program.
Well duh. Publications are so 1970's. All you need now is a little search engine... and boom! Any information you want is yours! And nobody will ever know who was looking for these things...
Except for all of the logs kept by google and friends... not like it's necessary to log everything, because you can report searches for key words like "nuclear arms how-to" and the likes. Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they can't see you...
It's a lot harder to pinpoint the location of someone who bought a magazine from a news stand than it is to have a machine log IPs of people searching for sketchy stuff. Unless there are little radio transmitters in magazines these days, which I wouldn't doubt.
Ease of hardware configuration...? I must be using my Mac wrong, as I've never heard of this "hardware configuration" you speak of.
Hmm... I don't care about the result, I just want to see what happens ;)
Long ago, I came across Carrion Sound, which has been tweaking toys and instruments of today and yesterday into noise masterpieces. Mp3 examples are there, too. A bit more on the artistic-side, but many of his examples are quite impressive. And although many-a Speak-and-Spell were destroyed in this man's work, he destroyed many, many, many, many other things, too.
Anyone who can turn a Pikachu doll into something even more disturbing should get a medal.